overlap adds more diffi-culties to the already difficult relationship between individual and collectivegoals of the American dream, in large part because it adds anxieties about di-versity and citizenship to concerns about opportunity and competition. Thefact that class and race or ethnicity are so intertwined and so embedded in thestructure of schooling may provide the greatest barrier of all to the achieve-ment of the dream for all Americans, and helps explain much of the contention,confusion, and irrationality in public education.

Similarly, it helps all children to have peers who take· school seriously, behave in ways that help them learn, and are backed by parents who have the resources to en-sure that schools satisfactorily educate their children. Most importantly, qual-ified, knowledgeable teachers make a difference. Well-off children almost \ always attend schools that have most of these features; poor children too fre-quently do not.

rom the perspective of the individual, the ideology is as compelling as it is simple. "I am an American, so I have the freedom and opportunity to make whatever I want of my life. I can succeed by working hard and using my tal-ents; if I fail, it will be my own fault. Success is honorable, and failure is not. In order to make sure that my children and grandchildren have the same free-dom and opportunities that I do, I have a responsibility to be a good citizen-to respect those whose vision of success is different from my own, to help make sure that everyone has an equal chance to succeed, to participate in the dem-ocratic process, and to teach my children to be proud of this country."

here is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America. -President Bill Clinton, 1993

We have a great national opportunity-to ensure that every child, in every school, is challenged by high standards, ... to build a culture of achievement that matches the optimism and aspirations of our country. -President George W Bush, 2000

We have a great national opportunity-to ensure that every child, in every school, is challenged by high standards, ... to build a culture of achievement that matches the optimism and aspirations of our country. -President George W Bush, 2000

This form of early tracking, or dividing children into labeled groups based on the teacher's designation of their skill level, seems innocent. What we know, however, based on mounds of research-most notably among them Rist's (1970/2000) study of same-raced children of various social classes-is that teacher and peer expectations for academic achievement (and their subsequent treatment of students) are based largely on low and negative perceptions of the poor, regardless of their actual ability. We know that disproportionate numbers of poor children are far more likely to be identified as less academically adept or even as having special needs. The early tracking and labeling of children reared in poverty is cumulative and devastating. It not only hampers students' self-esteem and cripples their own expectations of themselves but also, as Rist (1970/2000) discovered, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for what too often becomes a trajectory of underachievement.

The neighbor's point was an excellent one. Access to quality child care, early learning, preschool, and even kindergarten (which is not mandatory in all states) is key. Investments in quality early childhood education not only has one of the highest yields-for every $1 spent on early education and care, $8 is saved on crime, public assistance, supplemental schooling, and so on-but is also one of the most important stages at which a child's educational trajectory is shaped (Nisbett, 2009). The question we must ask of children reared in poverty is, When they set foot in kindergarten, how many years "behind" are they in learning opportunities, literacy and numeracy development, reading and writ-ing "behaviors," and the many benefits of quality early care? Although the nosy neighbor in our favorite film highlighted the disgustingly expensive extremes to which the wealthy will go to start their children's educational careers off right, the n~tion ~f needing to start every child's education with the highest quality expenences is spot on.

Woes in the Womb: Prebirth Effects on Educational Outcomes When I first constructed the ladder to describe how schools structure inequality, I struggled with where to begin. My training as an early childhood educator, experience as a child care provider, education in developmental psychology, and specialization in human development told me to start in the womb. What are the factors that affect poor children before they are even born? First, women and children are overrepresented in poverty (Gollnick & Chinn, 2009). Part-time employment is the only sphere in which women outearn men. Their pay on full-time jobs continues to lag, with women earning a mere 81 cents to the dollar when compared to men with equal or fewer credentials (Mundy, 2012). I often share with students that my sister's employer worked her 39 hours per week for years to avoid providing health insurance. She had no access to pap smears, annual "well woman" breast exams, birth control, or a regular physician when she took ill. My mother recently ended a one-year stint at Walmart, where she was daily promised full-time employment. She is 63 years old, takes 11 prescrip-tion medications and suffers from a number of health conditions that require frequent doctor ;isits. She was consistently worked just shy of 40 hours-again, the employer avoiding having to provide full-time benefits. During her final week on the job, she worked 39.5 hours.

On the basis of the inability of far too many people of color, as well as a vast number of Whites-neither of whom inherited wealth from their forebears-to purchase homes or, more important, to purchase homes in a "good school dis-trict,,, housing segregation continues to plague the educational and social out-comes of multiple members of the underclass. And on the basis of the method by which we have chosen to fund public schools in this country (relying heavily on the values of the surrounding properties), "demography is destiny" in that "students' test scores are highly correlated with the amount of money their parents make and the zip codes where they live" (Atkins, 2010, p. xi). It should be no secret, then, that people who lack access to generational or inherited wealth-and were legally barred from purchasing homes as the best prospect for building wealth-end up in subpar school districts that are funded by sub-par tax revenue. It should also be no wonder that the children of poor people attend poorly performing schools in poorly funded districts with disproportion-ate concentrations of poor classmates. And yes, students in these circumstances are more likely to perform poorly.

When I begin discussions about poverty and achievement in public schools, my students often ask, "Why do poor students perform poorly?" The question is not about poor students and why they underperform in a system purportedly designed to elevate their opportunities and outcomes. The question is, "Why are people poor?" I insist that we begin with the lowest "rung" on the diagram because there we unpack the existence of a class of "poor people" who seem not to be living up to their potential in a presumably benevolent public education system that was designed-at least in the spirit of Horace Mann-specifically with them in mind.

hat scores of students-well-meaning educators, all-fail to realize is that public education does not serve its intended function as the great equal-izer. Quite contrarily, schools actually structure inequality (gasp!) in insidiously subtle ways. To introduce countless future teachers to this "radical" notion ' I devised a plan to combat pernicious thinking about poor students, the educa-tional "failures" of poor students, and the "self-inflicted" demise of the poor.

Whether inspired by Mann's plea to elevate the masses to higher moral and financial ground via schooling, or other notions of social justice, even now Europeans refer to publicly funded education as "the social elevator" (Lopez-Fogues, 2011). As Mann originally conceived the function of public education, there was overt recognition that something in society was amiss, and that "something" could be effectively redressed by offering public education to all-not just some. The same "something" that Mann was acutely aware of and deeply troubled by was and is the gross and growing disparities among the social classes. We continue to need methods for shrinking overwhelming and widen-ing class divides. Many of us choose to address the equity gap by struggling to supply universal access to high-quality, free, and appropriate public education. Nearly two centuries later, "the great equalizer" cannot equalize soon enough.